Abstract
A comprehensive numerical study on coupled heat and mass transfer in an earth-to-air heat exchanger (EAHE) is conducted by self-complied program based on the finite volume method. The soil thermal and moisture coupled characteristics in the vicinity of the pipe and the thermal performance of the EAHE are evaluated by a two-dimensional simulation model. The model of the EAHE is verified by the experimental data, which achieved a good agreement with each other. The numerical results show that there is an obvious moisture peak in the radial direction, and the peak position radially moves away from the wall of the pipe over time. It is also found that the thermal performance of the heat and mass transfer model in soil is better than the pure heat conduction model.
Highlights
Nowadays, the energy consumption is growing rapidly
The results showed that the thermal performance of the wind tower coupled to earth-to-air heat exchanger (EAHE) was superior than the conventional cooling tower
A numerical study conducted on an EAHE integrated with an agricultural greenhouse is presented
Summary
The energy consumption is growing rapidly. in last decades, a large amount of energy consumption comes from non-renewable fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. Developed the new coupled differential equations for heat, mass and air transfer process in porous medium based on the above alternative model, which could result in a better accuracy and significantly reduce the simulation time by concentrating the computational effort in the vicinity of the soil-pipe. In order to determine the thermal and mass diffusion coefficients for two different types of soils, Shah et al [10] conducted a 1-D steady state soil column experiment They found that the ratio of the thermal diffusion coefficient to the moisture diffusion coefficient monotonically increases with increasing the moisture concentration, and gradually decrease after reaching a peak value. A comparative research is carried out for investigating the influence of different heat transfer models, which focuses on the thermal performance parameters of EAHE as follows: the daily mean efficiency, the difference between suction air temperature and delivery air temperature, the daily cooling potential, and derating factor in transient condition
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